Mauritian Creole - History

History

Although the Portuguese were the first Europeans to visit Mauritius, they did not settle there. The small Portuguese element in the vocabulary of Mauritian creole derives rather from the Portuguese element in European maritime jargons (such as Sabir and Lingua Franca) or from enslaved Africans or Asians who came from areas where Portuguese was used as a trade language. Similarly, while the Dutch had a colony on Mauritius between 1638 and 1710, all the Dutch settlers evacuated the island to Réunion, leaving behind only a few runaway slaves who would have no discernible impact on Mauritian Creole. The French then claimed Mauritius and first settled it between 1715 and 1721.

As they had done on Réunion and in the West Indies, the French created on Mauritius a plantation economy based on slave labor. Slaves became a majority of the population of Mauritius by 1730, and were 85% of the population by 1777. These forced migrants came from West Africa, East Africa, Madagascar, and India. Given the resulting linguistic fragmentation, French became the lingua franca among the slaves. However, the small size of the native French population on the island, their aloofness from most of their slaves, and the utter lack of formal education for slaves ensured that the slaves' French would develop in very different directions from the slaveowners' French. Historical documents from as early as 1773 already speak of the "creole language" that the slaves spoke.

The British took over Mauritius during the Napoleonic era, but few English-speakers ever settled there and by then Mauritian Creole was firmly entrenched. The abolition of slavery in the 1830s enabled many Mauritian Creoles to leave the plantations, and the plantation owners started bringing in Indian indentured workers to replace them. Though the Indians soon became, and remain, a majority on the island, their own linguistic fragmentation and alienation from the English- and French-speaking white elite led them to take up Mauritian Creole as their main lingua franca. English and French have long enjoyed greater social status and dominated government, business, education, and the media, but Mauritian Creole's popularity in most informal domains has persisted.